Seeing Galaxies through Thick and Thin. III. Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of the Dust in Backlit Spiral Galaxies*

摘要

We present analysis of Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 imaging of two spiral galaxies partially backlit by elliptical or S0 systems in the pairs AM 1316-241 and AM 0500-620, as well as the (probably spiral) foreground system in NGC 1275. Images in B and I are used to determine the reddening curve of dust in these systems. The foreground spiral component of AM 1316-241 shows dust strongly concentrated in discrete arms, with a reddening law very close to the Milky Way mean [R = AV/E(B-V) = 3.4 ± 0.2]. The dust distribution is scale-free between about 100 pc and the arm dimension, about 8 kpc. The foreground spiral in AM 0500-620 shows dust concentrated in arms and interarm spurs, with measurable interarm extinction as well. In this case, although the dust properties are less well-determined than in AM 1316-241, we find evidence for a steeper extinction law than the Milky Way mean (formally, R ≈ 2.5 ± 0.4, with substantial variation depending on data quality in each region). The shape of the reddening law suggests that at least in AM 1316-241 we have resolved most of the dust structure. In AM 0500-620 it is less clear that we have resolved most of the dust structure, since the errors are larger. In AM 0500-620, the slope of the perimeter-scale relation (associated with fractal analysis) steepens systematically when going from regions of low to high extinction. A perimeter-smoothing length test for scale-free (fractal) behavior in AM 1316-241 shows a logarithmic slope typically -0.4 on 100–1000 pc scales. However, we cannot determine a unique fractal dimension from the defining area-perimeter relation, so the projected dust distribution is best defined as fractal-like. For scales above 2–4 pixels (120–250 pc), the box-counting estimate yields a fractal dimension close to 1.4, but the perimeter-area relation yields a dimension of 0.7 on large scales and inconsistent results for small scales, so that the distribution shows only some aspects of a fractal nature. In neither galaxy do we see significant regions, even on single-pixel scales in spiral arms, with AB > 2.5. The measurements in NGC 1275 are compromised by our lack of independent knowledge of the foreground system's light distribution, but masked sampling of the absorption suggests an effective reddening curve much flatter than the Milky Way mean (but this may indicate that the foreground system has been affected by immersion in the hot intracluster gas or is inside the stellar distribution of NGC 1275). The bright blue star clusters trace the absorption in this system quite closely, indicating that these clusters belong to the foreground system and not to NGC 1275 itself.